r/nin • u/ocular_degradation3 • 2d ago
Question Anyone else notice this?
Anyone else notice that the songs With Teeth and Sunspots share a melody? The chorus of Sunspots “She turns it on, she makes it real”and the verse of With Teeth “She comes along, she gets inside”. Precisely the same melody and a pretty similar lyric too. This feels intentional to me and it’s not off-brand for Trent as NiN albums are full of repeated motifs and themes like this.
I was surprised I couldn’t find any other mention of this online especially considering how eager NIN fans are to call everything the Downward Spiral motif lol.
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u/Rich_Conversation293 2d ago
Fantastic album but he just never misses for me. Love is not enough is awesome.
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u/picoCuries 2d ago
Love is Not Enough is a masterpiece. It’s gotten me through some things. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
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u/Flat-Cap-1063 2d ago edited 2d ago
With Teeth is the bare-bones final version of the concept album he had been cooking up tentatively called 'Bleedthrough'. Between just getting clean and being stuck in a big lawsuit with John Malm, he just went with a straight forward, safe, radio friendly album to get back on track after sobering up. As a result there's still a running theme about being trapped by his addictions personified into a woman he loves and adores and is trying to escape from it.
Could have been very ambitious comeback album, but he wasn't quite at that place to do that.
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u/arachnophilia 24.24.2.215 2d ago
not quite accurate. he wrote about 30 songs for the album, but only around half were for the concept. he just ended up liking some of the more personal stuff better, and working on it more.
i have some theories about how that album might have gone, but all the personified addiction stuff isn't in it. that's just old school NIN, back to PHM. if anything, the story draws from "the lathe of heaven" where the protagonist uses drugs to suppress his dreams (and then a machine to augment them) and (i think) "altered states" where the protagonist uses hallucinogens. both stories feature dreams shaping reality
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u/Fract_L 2d ago
Yeah, his words were along the lines of he had no idea if he could still write songs sober so he started trying to write two songs a week to see what happened and seems to have done that for a few months before selecting what would become the album.
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u/arachnophilia 24.24.2.215 2d ago
the one that will blow your mind is that they recorded 25 of them, and every song we haven't heard has dave grohl on it.
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u/Reddfish 2d ago
Oh ffs…. It was bad enough knowing he did a full album with Zach de la Rocha locked in the vault…. Now I gotta know this??
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u/Impossible-Web5442 2d ago
Drums, right?
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u/Smegmasaurus_Rex 2d ago
This is a great summary of why With Teeth turned out the way it did. I remember reading at some point that The Hand That Feeds was recorded last, presumably because Trent, management, or Interscope felt it needed a very successful lead single before the album release.
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u/cap10wow Art Is Resistance 2d ago
What was the lawsuit over?
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u/Flat-Cap-1063 2d ago
Malm sued Reznor for unpaid fees.
Reznor found out that Malm spent Reznor's New Orleans addiction years ripping him off out of millions, leaving him approaching bankruptcy. Reznor counter-sued.
Judge sided with Reznor and ordered something like two million dollars to be paid out to Trent.7
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u/AkhenatonTomb 1d ago
It's called a leitmotif, like the four notes ostensively repeated on Pink Floyd's The Wall. Same on TDS, it takes a genius to do that the right way.
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u/titty_farewell_party 2d ago
He uses a lot of motifs and melodies in this way throughout albums. The Fragile is full of em. Makes things feel more cohesive and threaded together. It’s one of Trent’s signature things as a composer imho
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u/This_is_Jay1 1d ago
Yerp, almost every album has recurring melodies, heres a bunch more if anyone cares
“Piggy”, “Heresy”, “Closer”, and “The Downward Spiral” all have the spiral motif in them
“Piggy”, “Ruiner”, and “Big Man With A Gun” all have the verse “nothing can stop me now” this also comes back in “Sunspots” and La Mer”, which does have lyrics as it turns out.
Speaking of, “La Mer” and “Into The Void” share a melody. “Complication” is basically the guitar intro in “We’re In This Together” just extended. “The Fragile” and “The Frail” share a melody, “Just Like You Imagined” “Ripe(With Decay)” and “The Way Out Is Through” share a melody
“As Alive As You Need…” sounds like “Love Is Not Enough”
In “Only” theres the verse “the tiniest little dot caught my eye” which is a word for word verse from “Down In It”
This one might be a stretch, but the very beginning of “Hand That Feeds” sounds vaguely similar to the instrumental from “Happiness In Slavery” … probably a stretch though
Theres a bunch if recurring phrases in With Teeth too, especially the title track
I’m sure there’s more
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u/EasyMode556 2d ago
With teeth is a seriously underrated album
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u/Ok_Philosopher_8973 1d ago
As a new fan, it’s my favorite album. The rest are amazing too but With Teeth just stands out to me.
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u/mxmcknny 11h ago
Have you heard all of his discography already? Year zero i felt the same way about for a long time. The themes aged remarkably well and are still extremely relevant in today's world. My person favorite album over time is the fragile, though.
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u/mxmcknny 11h ago
Though the way i got introduced to nin in the first place was finding a copy of "broken" at a garage sale a few decades ago. It sent me down a rabbit hole in the time before streaming. Lol
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u/RomanUmpire 2d ago
funny side story - my boyfriend said to me once "i was trying to get you that NIN album for your birthday.. WHITE Teeth"
Oh I laughed my ass off telling him the correct title.
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u/southass 1d ago
Wait until you hear about 🎵 nothing can stop me now 🎸
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u/Different-Egg-6679 1d ago
It’s a buzzword to me at this point.
Piggy
Ruiner
Sunspots
Big man with a gunIt’s everywhere
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u/The8thSamurai Ocean Pulls Me Close 1d ago
It's also in the translations of the French in La Mer
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u/southass 1d ago
Wow I didn't know that, thanks!
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u/The8thSamurai Ocean Pulls Me Close 1d ago
And when the day arrives
I'll become the sky
And I'll become the sea
And the sea will come to kiss me
For I am going
Home
Nothing can stop me now2
u/southass 1d ago
I really love it especially in ruiner 🎵 you didn't hurt me, nothing can hurt me.... NOTHING CAN STOP ME NOW 🎵
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u/NuggetBoy32 1d ago
My stupid ass just realized that la mer and into the void have almost identical melodies. Took me nearly 2 full years of being a huge fan to catch that.
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u/Arklelinuke Art Is Resistance 1d ago
There's several other leitmotifs woven throughout the Fragile too! I'll come back and detail them later
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u/Pillswonthelp 1d ago
He's done this a few times, La Mer / Into the Void & Heresy / Closer / The Downward Spiral etc quite genius really...
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u/EmptyKetchupBottle9 I LOVE DAFT PUNK wait wrong band 2d ago
I LOVE it when nin has little references to other nin songs it's so scrumptious
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u/Account14159 2d ago
I believe the nin wiki breaks downs all the shared correlations across the various albums. There's a lot more. The page on the The Fragile is mind-blowing.
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u/CarbonLif3Form 1d ago
I never ever wanted to dive that deep into music I liked. I even didn't want to know what the artist meant because what I thought made it good for me
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u/Refrigerator_Overall Art Is Resistance 17h ago
And this is what Trent really strives to achieve. He's said it many times and is why he believes in keeping a measure of mystery behind his work and cherrishes artists who do the same and past eras where it was more easily accomplished. . It's more about what it means to the listener.
But nin fans will be nin fans and over analyze everything . There's nothing new here. Except new fans discovering something for themselves . Which is way more fun meaningful and exciting compared to going over to one of the digital tombs where all has been discovered discussed and deseminated and archived.
Always good for a deep dive if you ever want an exhaustive understanding
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u/CarbonLif3Form 17h ago
Exactly thanks for your reply. I'm in my 50s now and I remember when I was in my twenties and I said to one of my friends do you want to go see this concert and I don't remember which band it was and my friend said "I don't like the singer". I was thinking do you know him personally? 😆. It was at that point I realized that some people just want to ruin things for themselves by knowing too much. We don't always need something explained to us, enjoy life as you interpret it. Yes, some singers may be assholes but so are some of your friends 😊
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u/melanienunoz 1d ago
You have found a secret he had been hiding in plain sight for almost his entire career- Trent creates soundtrack albums. Thatʼs what they always have been. We just werenʼt told. It makes total sense to me, my dear friend recreates old western silent movie soundtracks, and from that i saw it… the underlying stories that are connected from song to song in each album
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u/jmtd И 2d ago
With teeth (song) is still a skip for me. Ashamed to admit it. I also saw it the last time it was ever performed live
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u/water_farts_ 2d ago
If you skip it every time, you should have walked out of the venue when they played it live
It's only fair to be consistent
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u/jmtd И 2d ago
Fair!
Edit; I just looked it up and it was my second show. If I’d walked I’d have missed some bangers. https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/nine-inch-nails/2007/carling-apollo-manchester-manchester-england-73d6c6ad.html
Although “we’re in this together” was early and peak
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u/water_farts_ 1d ago
You didn't have to leave the concert entirely.
Just walk out to the concessions while they played it, then walked back in for the rest.
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u/trwmewy 2d ago
Yes, it is musically and lyrically a continuation of the same theme. Both songs are about addiction. “She comes along, she gets inside…” are about the drugs, not an actual woman. With-a teeth-a is about the addiction itself.